Literary Works of Fargo Kantrowitz

“The trouble with being a writer is never being able to find the ending of a story so as to start fresh the next day.”
Albert Jones 2010

The trouble with the mirror is the reflection of course, the close ever close and coursing circle of you within you. They never promised you’d get a rose garden. But it’s not the end of the world. On the expansive superhighway there are your speeders and those you have left behind. The art of destroying the competition. It’s the game, I guess. It’s not real. Numbers. Before they could teach me about numbers they had to sit down and talk to me about how in the hell A could become a herd of buffalo. They never did. Oh well. I didn’t become a doctor nor a lawyer.

Most would call me stupid. No money. No name. No family. The no’s could go on forever. Regret? Sure, you betcha. Plenty of regret. Oh well, what are you going to do about it…Gain? Weight gain. What then? What’s left? What’s left for me to not to have gotten to have? Just about everything I’d guess. Oh well. Yeah, a little regret.

The sun was down now. Night again. Always night and nowhere to go no one to talk to. It’s going to be a modern hipsterevening because they’re the only ones who have the chance of being future readers after everybody has disappointed them later in their lives. But maybe that’s just the regret talking. I wish everybody well including myself and the more I let myself just be stupid like that the better I feel. That is intelligence that they can’t give you a diploma of in college.

I’m a post-modernist myself, a latent hipster myself. Diggin it. Studied mysticality and mythology extensively, at least a little bit more than normal. When I got my doctorate I told the world that it was great, that I now had a license to be nuts. Heheheh.

Susie says I’m bi-polar, but I don’t think so. I think I am something for which a name has been give only once. I would hate to think that I spend my life on a bi-pole contraption where my thoughts swing monkeylike back and forth until I am so compartmentalized in my explanation of myself that I forget that I’m the color blue. I’m not blue, but for instance. Does it matter anymore that I am the color blue? Maybe I am blue because there is a reason to be blue. That would mean I would have a whole new section of the ship to tend to to take the ship home and I’m just standing at attention all the time. Is Bi-Polar designation too unmythological? Maybe. That’s my formal education talking. You’ll have to forgive me at times.

I couldn’t make it at their cocktail parties. I didn’t feel inspired at that school either. I was meant to be a writer and researcher. Sam says he could get me a few speaking gigs on my whole Foller Yer Dreams shtick, a comedy bit, that I do about following Yer dreams. A lot of guys are trying to use this right now and it’s as good a shtick as any, Thomas in Vegas, Barclay over in London, a few others. Debbie…who is another story. Debbie and I had a fling. I hate to say it. But we had a fling. Bad on both our sides. Oh well. Like I said. Oh well. Turns out she’s a hessian or is that hussy? She’s got these claws that go out and scratch you as though she’s just trying to keep you next to her. She’s a big Jaglom film lover, but doesn’t ever get it that guys are as good as chicks. She’s like totally nothing I do and when I broke up with her she called my girlfriend who then broke up with me. Debbie. I think there’s a magician in Australia who uses it too.

The thing is that when you start telling your story because you want to you’re good, you don’t worry about others. But when you think that you enjoy it enough to want to do it all the time, even to make a living at it, you start wondering what the world was seeing and you slow down and are like the rabbit in the headlamps. We all have that aspect of ourselves. We hate it because we hate to think that we would stand there in the road staring at those headlights until it was too late. Snap out of it they say. Snap out of it. Well, you’ve got to if you are in it. But if you’re not then you shouldn’t be thinking like you were going to go back to it. That’s back rocking horse seesaw stuff.

Okay, I’ll tell you about Follow Yer Dreams. Follow Yer Dreams was something I used to say a long time ago back when you could say something and carry it around with you like a sign, before the internet. I was a dancer for a local club, a dude dancer, the kind that rocks out with the women and makes them think that not every man is a shmuck and at least one can dance and they’d gotten their money’s worth and all. When I got my Ph.d from the Oceanic I’d learned one thing. That it was mine. It was a piece of paper that I was lucky enough to be able to afford through debt and it stated that I did the work. Now, whether that institution is considered valid by those in positions of authority would be another matter. I’m not saying that the The Institute of Oceanic Consciousness is not a good school. It is, it is one of the best in what it specializes in: psychology, mythology, mysticism and the like. Highly regarded in fact within those “circles.” But it is a small world, too few dollars for every subject. Mysticism would often go out with barnacle bending and buckling.

But mysticism was where Follow Yer Dreams came from. I don’t know nothing. I don’t even talk like this, but I feel like I speak like this. You know what I mean? Nah, you wouldn’t. It was just that I was interested in the subject matter and then suddenly poof I was in the academic realm. Barkey was scratching his tit under the t.v. But when I got out of Oceanic I couldn’t parlay nothing into nothing except the university gig and that was an accident after seeing Bette Sue over at the Domgarten. Spaaten. You know what I mean.

People don’t much want to make their living like me using words and thoughts well enough to get bread and butter through them. Real bread and butter. I did. Like I say, I’m hyperactivementalogistically and that doesn’t mean that I am wrong. I am not on some radical and bad end of some pole, come to think of it, do they mean the actual pole or the two poles, or staffs really, on the opposite ends of the earth? Questions.

To be honest, to this day, I still don’t know what Follow Yer Dreams means, except now it’s out there and I make usually anywhere to four to five thousand dollars per month from it. Then the talks at the bookstores and all that and I got me this house overlooking the ocean, and it’s all good. It’s done. I’d followed my dream and gotten this house overlooking the ocean. When I suddenly looked up and wondered if I was possibly staring into the headlights. What was I doing here? What now? I had no love in my life. Single. Looking, but feeling ugly compared to past evaluations. I didn’t know what to do. I went to page 192, it’s a long book, and saw what I wanted to see:

If you follow your dreams you will not be left alone to the hounds of the world. The hounds of the world are the same hounds that you would find in hell but more real world, not as evil. But still they’ll nipping at your heel. Why? Because you wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t. You’re human. Things chase you in your mind or you chase things. It’s a give and take, a big game of tag you’re it. So go out there and Follow Yer Dreams, because what else you gonna chase?

There it was, right there, as clear as your dreams. I’d capitalized Follow Yer Dreams. I’d trademarked it. That’s what I mean, there’s a few guys here and there using it, Thomas, Barclay, Debbie till she petered out. But I did it first. Yup. I capitalized the three words first and got the big bucks. But I didn’t mean to take away from the other stuff by doing it, but did. You see? I put a big sponge in the bucket of thought and it took everything else away. Why? Because you brought money into the equation. It’s like being at a cocktail party and suddenly saying excuse me and then whacking off right there momentarily until you are re-fastened properly enough to join back in the conversation.

That was the rabbit in the headlights as I looked out my wallwindow of sea.

I don’t like to say it destroyed me, but I will say that it is something that took me away from my original goal of really following my own dreams and doing some good work in my field and not worry about books, just publish them and be allowed to be left alone with my ocean’s hum and write.

When the capitalizations stop is when the original works begin.
So I’m there. I’m really there. That’s what I saw, what my rabbit stare turned into. It turned into a real pathway, but one thing I hadn’t really thought of was the letters. They never told me about the letters.

To Kleven Benjamin
From Lisa Wentworthy

Dear Mr. Benjamin,

I too have flown from a mountain, sailed, as you say, the way that you saw the world there blue and waiting and you yet had your wings and yet you went anyway, soared, sailed, sprouting your wings as your faith first lifted you. I too have experienced this.
I was wondering if perhaps you would like to speak at our gathering this coming Friday at 7 p.m. We are a light hearted group with mystical leanings. We are not naïve, but we do believe in what we believe. I am single and within birthing age.

Thank you,

Lisa

See what I mean? Everywhere you went there would be another one. Just when you loved them there would be another one and then they would start adding up on top of each other, but some of the things that they said. Lisa wrote back three times and by the third times I wanted to marry this girl, but then there was that weird statement about being of “birthing age.” Who says that except someone being held in chains somewhere. She seems like a Quaker. I got all the high flying ones for sure. Those were my specialty and I should have known it, but it’s the field too isn’t it? Isn’t it just that I no longer believe? Maybe. I stepped out of a lot of things on this little journey and accepted some new roles the most enormous being that of the role of “father.” An archetype. I didn’ t have any kids. I was always too screwed up to mate well. Yet there it is. It’s what paid for the view, the need of the people to have a surrogate father for 16.95 from the bookstore.

So I guess that’s why I slur back into stupidity. Why not? I’m not the story that they wrote about me. I’m just me. I was glad that I wrote Follow Yer Dreams though because I still believed it after all these years. But where does the end of the story begin? Even that doesn’t make sense.

Modern man is in a predicament unlike he’s ever been in before. I refuse to call this the “travails of the information age” because before technological advances made information as readily available as watching the evening sunset, there was still the fact of the over abundance of image in need of processing and this feat has been no small one by any means.
What I mean by being in an altogether new predicament comes from my belief that not only are we being given information, but the competitive human spirit is tying the assimilation of that information into our economic well being. The onslaught of the computer age has left most people grateful and yet perplexed as to not only how to use its machines but what the meaning of these machines is. There is no easy answer to this quandary. Man has given himself a mechanical brain, a brain that disseminates information, if not in the same way, then in a way that mimics it. This predicament, some would say, is no predicament, but a joy, a way to make it so that our own brains do not need to work harder than they have to. Unfortunately, our brains are also our minds and our minds continually seek, but irrationally. It does not seek to know like a computer, but to feel, to experience.
The artist is an example of both the victim and victor over the chronological mindset of computers and the almost virile power that this heightened mechanical process can inject into the previously virgin soul. We are supple beings. We meld into the latest thing as if we were born ready to fall into its arms even if when we were born it had not yet existed. The utilitarian power of computers is undeniable, but can we really ask ourselves to strive towards a purely rational mode of thought when perhaps the creators of this world, it’s leaders, mentors, sages were among some of the most psychedelic of minds. Can we ask the two worlds to merge in Peoria?

But the worlds are merging. We are becoming softened to the realities and being given a chance to say either “yes” or “no” to them via the images of internet and t.v. We have given ourselves over to the wiser powers. Those of us who want money or prestige attempt to break into the inside circle of software creating hives where we will be accepted by a fearless leader whose original vision came anywhere and everywhere but from a computer. In a way we accept the “trips” that others have taken at the expense of taking our own. Timothy Leary understood the nature of computers, saying in essence that it is the new high for the coming millennium.
But there is something false in it. Just as a word cannot be what it connotes, we too cannot be where we “go.” In fact, we go nowhere except into our own minds. True, the computer we use is our tool, where images are given to us and we grasp or duck them. The accepted images cling to us like burrs to our socks. The dreaded ones pass on only to be accepted by somebody else. When we are thus so well fed then how can we turn away from our feeder, the giver, the mother? There is no straight line walked simply in this world unless it is away from something. That which we accept needs be taken deeply into the soul. A Buddhist when he sits often does so facing a blank wall. A modern man needs the pictures. The artist needs the rounding out of the pictures in a search for meaning or structure. The philosopher needs to turn off the screen.
I use a computer to write. I have a word processing program, a screenplay writing program, a graphic design program and I used to have been an avid user of E-mail. This is not about using the computer. I’ve watched children stare in amazement at educational programs. I do not want to rid the world of a scourge which is not a scourge. My aim is to perhaps make one person who needs to, consider the nature of their modern existence. Perhaps my first concern is only for myself. When my faculties of discernment become too thinned and yet I insist on placing more and more food on my plate as if to devour all of the food in the world in the shortest amount of time will make me healthy, happy, wise and strong then I am fooling myself. The mis-education in our society is not that we learn too little, but that we learn too much. We don’t take the time to sift through what we’ve already got and allow the natural connections to unfold in a manner that we may see.
I don’t blame our educational system per se for we only want what everybody else wants, teachers included, that is, to give to children the necessary tools that they need to live productive and happy lives. But there are too many accidents. Too many deaths. Too much violence. Too little acceptance for difference. Too much hate stemming from too much pain. There is no one panacea for our societal ills. There is no one answer. We are ill equipped to ask the proper questions whenever two or more are gathered. One mind believes in reality as such and the other believes in a different world. All that we can ask is that “we get along” as Rodney King so poetically and simply stated it. We need to unplug our worlds at times and ironically enough, after we do, we then need to plug back in and take a few more strides towards the ever flowing stream of technology, political kindness which some would perhaps call an oxymoron, and the rosebud, never to be picked mind you, of an infant dream where morality is as the whirlpool and our greatest feat is not to dive, but to hold sacred without knowing fully or even expecting to in this life, its answer blurred yet glistening like a diamond in a stream.

This is the writing that matters most,
this moment, now.
I have rocked upon a million waves
in my quest for the perfect “word”
Really, you must want to write when you most want to love
and I have always been a big lover
except when I hated.
We fly low over kitten farms.

There were llittle hills and little valleys. No where was there a world better than this world and only far away could the “scary” things be presumed to be, far away from all, as though we lived on silver clouds and invisible biospheres made of plastic no glass no float, did I say “float” I mean, what I mean to say is that I think that something in you ultimately has to give in, you, as a person, me as a rider across these winded plains, everybody’s got to dig in, in their own way and if we can avoid it we can say to one another that there is room with all of us whether it be in staying or in passing. I think that it matters a lot to the world if there is something to say about something that there is to say about something about if there is something to say about something…

The day the dawn turned carpet hued, red, orange and filtered then, blue, blue? What color this in all this heat! Friends in the cooler, hopes hang in the air, you dine again with literature, wondering why now why you are one of the few left at the academy, the academy of readiness in silent rooms where books reach high into the rafters, somewhere up high is Knowledge and with this “gnosis” there is some magic of some kind, of some kind, no matter how little nor grand, magic, in a way that none of us can fully understand because we are all from this world, you, me, we. Everybody. I forgot what I was going to say.

The day the dawn turned carpet hued. Red, orange and filtered then, blue. Blue? What color this in all this heat! Friends, in the cooler, hopes hang in the air, you dine again with literature, wondering why now you are one of the few left at the academy where books pile high and eyes wide upon all. The academy is window dressing for Truth which stands tall with Knowledge among the rafters. Pizza. What if we sell pizza!

There were little red dots and it became that they were the mumps and granny had to spend three months in the hospital in st. lean and then there was no more hospital because the big wind come and granny was in it. Lived three days after that and told the story ever after, over and over again how she “Flew!” she just flew. It was the greatest experience of granny’s life and she was afraid she was maybe a witch and felt penance, but she enjoyed it, sure, but it killed. Her . it most certainly did do that.

2

it seems the summer never ends. Me and granny are the pickers these days. Jacklyn is in Trent. God knows what. Mabel, the Other granny around her is always sick in bed with something, Willis works, Todd delays at the pool hall, Ernest cries, Faith lies, Bridget dines on seashells for awhile, then nothing. Boredom.

We stop this novel for an announcement…in fifteen minutes when you’re reading along there will be the words “Uncle Filibluster” plastered on the page in full pronouncement, only that time, there won’t be no rhyme or reason and….Mr. Whurlingzser? Yes…yes?
Wake up sir, we’ve landed in Leningrad. Alright, alright, will do, thank you, madam, thank you. I will…I will….

From the unintelligible wrath of god by Fargo Kantrowitz:

Who was fargo kantrowitz?

Fargo Kantrowitz was born Joey Kantor in the year 1964 in the city of las vegas Nevada in the united states of America. Kansas city was the main stage of that America when everybody wanted to live in Kansas city. Everybody thought it would be cool if you could go to Kansas city and make it in the rackets, whatever anybody thought that the rackets were back then, drugs, of course, but not for wackenhurst, although he did smoke a little pot now and then. He thought about it. Does he want to go to the big city or does he want to stay and make it at his home? He decides. He will stay. He will make it on his own at home. That is what he would do, but there was an evil stepbrother who thought differently. The other one, the second born, whose wishes never matched Joey’s, whose belief system did not include……………(Hello……this isn’t a joke……I’m stuck inside this story…………….if you…..could only please help me by writing me out of this damned story!
Kantor looked down at this page.
What can I believe of a story that screams of me. What would I know of a place so bold. I would think that you are nothing but an animal, my friend, so everything is going to be a foolish game. I think that we are people and we make the world like sheeple the better and the wondrous all the same. There’s people eating plame.

(Fargo kantrowitz 08)
\

from the fake novel The unintelligible wrath of god:

Hollow roars on English paths wonderous days lie ahead
Fat far fittens, along hurley kittens, furl their flag and delay all the nuown
All the purrs in the mittens

f.k. 08

the unintelligible wrath of god…

part 2

this is part two of what I am about to call tuwog. Tuwog was born The Unintelligable Wrath of God, a novel by Fargo Kantrowitz who is really Joey kantor who gave away, what, his novel?
Cut!
Cut?
Listen, Charlie, I know you think the line is giving up your whatevers, your…
His novel…
His novel…right, his novel, but it isn’t his novel, it’s his navel, you see, he doesn’t want to give up the comfort of being a navel-gazer, a dreamer, a schlep, you see, he’s a comedic hero, not some shlep who needs to have a book around just to be comfortable. He wants to give up his dreamlife, for god’s sake, and get a real life. That’s what he wants. The novel ain’t even in the script. It’s navel.

Okay.
Okay?
Okay. I got it. Navel. A dreamer. Gotcha.
Great….okay, back in action. Let’s do it again.

This is part two of what I am about to call tuwog. Tuwog was born The Unintelligable Wrath of God, a navel by Fargo Kantrowitz who is really Joey Kantor who gave away, what, his navel?
Cut!

Fargokantrowitz o8

Part iii of tuwog….

The world askied for it and it got it. The unintelligible wrath of god in two sets both book and literary. Don’t forget to buy your tuwog postcards to send to your friends. And do you have a tshirt? Well, now you can. You can have your very own tuwog tshirt by sending 16.99 plus postage and handling to tuwog, port royal new hamnpshire, west Covina Hampton drive, 2352 Ferryboat way. Massachussetts. Tuwog is the first major work of literature that comes with its own advertising campaign. You see. You can’t write a novel without having an advertising campaign. Turns out, you have to do one of two things and either way could end you up in the poorhouse 1. You could act like you don’t care about the fact that your novel has to have an advertising component and not do it and really write a good novel, but then it won’t sell. You’ve got to figure out how to dumb it down to the editors, really, more than the people because the editors are the gatekeepers and they’re very busy, busier, perhaps, than any other breed of person on the planet. I would hate to be an editor and be so busy that you can barely find time to get back to people or to read their work, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, then nothing. Boom. It’s over. That editor is gone. Too busy. Or you can go with the advertising component of your novel and realize that you bette really make this one “swing.” Groovy, cat, wow! Simple simon met a pieman and tuwog is on its wayh, that’s way baby, tuwog, your novel, is here and it is asking you, wow, oh, ooW! Or not. Sometimes life can be such a bore. I mean, look, really, do you really want to live in a novel as a person or a concept and have an advertising “component” right there beside you? What would Jane Eyre have done if one of the members of her inner circle were an Advertising Component? It boggles the fucking mind. Excuse my French. (insert quote in French here. Quote should say something like this: sometimes when you do not know what you are going to do, you choose to do otherwise. That choice melded in wiwth the million other life choices of those participating with us in this planet creates an amalgum of method and thought which has power and often grace. On the other side is the obverse, negative reaction that causes hate and pain. The balance of these universes, these “polarities” mean the difference between victory and defeat in the world. When defeat comes near, when it pokes it’s nose into your own face, you wonder about the fragility of life. Your dreams can’t help you anymore, your mythological saints, your own private “components.” But you trek forward anyway meeting that fierce and fiery gaze and say no, today, no, tomorrow, no.

Fargo kantrowitz 08

He re again. Don’t like to type except when said typewriter is on my belly. Gave the good lie they did to get my money back when English was something that mattered. Study English and you will write. Didn’t work out. Brain too weird. Didn’t like the work. Drown or starve or something but no money from English. The lie of the university that English will pay your bills. English wont pay your bills. Hard work will. And not hard work at English. Tried that. Didn’t work. Too weird.

If only the world could come together in a good way. That words could matter again. I kknow that they can’t. they never will. I will be the only one to read them. Too weird. They wanted me to be a n artist and then I would have money and I wouldn’t have to work at things I didn’t want to work at, but it s not true. God doesn’t care if you are doing what you are supposed to be doing. He just wants his taxes. If you don’t pay your taxes you experience the unintelligible wrath of god. He hates us all it seems. Every last one of us. And he should . we are fallible, malleable, putty and weak. Why wouldn’ he want to make it harder for us? Wouldn’t we want to make it harder on , say, ants? Or a puppy? Or a kitten? Or on a group of people who happen to be stupoid enough to have built their house on sand. Jus tlike the bible story said. Serves the bastard right and god gets to smile a little bit as the people are washed off the face of the earth forever. But what about the fear? What about the pain? Didn’t god see that? Apparently not. Apparently, he thinks its only fair that I should be aware as I start to go under and drown, when the fire starts to burn up my body, when I watch a child begin to die due to a violent end. Serves them right. He’s right though. He’s right though. We deserve it. Where’s the drugs?

Some people are poets because that’s what they are. They are poets because if they were not poets then they would just be stupid. Their brains wouldn’t work the right way. They have to get out what is inside of them as though it is a poison that must be expelled. Drats that my career consists of that. That my career consists of doing a job that makes me have to spill the beans over and over and over again. I am tired of it. It is not what I want. What I want is solidity. The end to weakness. I want to experience and enjoy, not ruminate. But that’s okay. I chose my way. And yet it never chose me back, it has , in fact, spurned me. that’s okay. That’s okay

Get yourself out of the mess.
If perchance you succeed
then help others ever after to do the same.
Help one person
knowing that by doing so
you are helping many people.
Let economic love grow.
Do not force it or try to manipulate it.
Let it show you.
The horse knows the way.

Imagine if in the deserts all around you,
the lost lands
where you knew you would never ever go,
you went, and there discovered a world unimagined yet lived.
The world entwining yourself: jobs, hopes, dreams, ignorances
and just plain dumb bad luck,
has found you,
then you went.
You went because you saw someone else chasing a dream like a butterfly,
that man was retarded
and bleeding,
and you wanted to help.
But to help meant walking to Sunrise Mountain.
At night.
Till the marshes anyway.

Babybirds is my third book (60,000 words).
i also have a compilation of short stories – The World is Alright Today.
I have written a screenplay for one of my novels, Thy Soul’s Immensity. My first novel was written in 1994
and had to do with the race riots in Los Angeles
concerning the beating down of Rodney King.
I wrote for The Dudley Review and Alchemy on Sunday.
I attended Pacifica Graduate Institute (97) in California
and The University of Nevada, Reno (90)
with a year spent at State University of New York at Stony Brook
where I studied under historical Irish novelist and Joycean expert Thomas Flanagan
and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louis Simpson.

It was an accidental jaunt away from societal norms, if just for a little while, for Evan, a just fired Casino executive.
By befriending “the Man,” Bernard Sandler, a severely retarded man on a mission to rescue “babybirds” on the “mountain,” (Bernard’s only two words), Evan discovers a world he frankly didn’t even know was there.
It is the world of the people of the marshes and the realm of sheer utter faith that better will come. It’s got to. It’s just got to. Or so they believe as they go.

From Babybirds
Copyright Library of Congress
2010
Fargo Kantrowitz

His mother had been gone for ten years now and Bernard had adjusted, but his memory of her remained. It has been said that when a parent dies they are not gone, but they move in with you. Bernard survived the loss of his mother through the absorption of her spirit, the unconscious memory of the musicality of her words and the green valleys that were her eyes. She had been storing good thoughts in his head in preparation for the time that he would need them and in Bernard’s case it seemed to have worked. Instead of dreaming of a lost and departed mother he dreamed of the beautiful things that his mother had introduced him to: animals and music and the lyrical quality of the spoken word which seemed to promise more and more beauty and goodness. In this way he lived a peaceful existence and was only rarely attacked by the demons that could seemingly destroy him, the demons that he tried to force out of his head through dizziness and that were sparked by the slightest thought that nobody but Bernard could ever know.

Believed to be the son of either Horus or Re, the sun god. These two gods were often indistinguishable, especially when Horus wore the sun disc.
In the new kingdom 1567-1069 bc the pharoah was believed to be the son of Amun, the then ascendant God. In the temples of Luxor, reliefs show how Amun assumed the form of the reigning pharoah and united with his queen, giving rise to the new pharoah’s birth. To avoid any rivalry between ram-headed Amun and Re, both gods were assimilated in the form of the composite deity, Amun-Re. Luxor and Karnak were raised in honour of amun-Re.

The harmony of the universe was believed to depend on the well being of the pharoah. He was the chief priest of the Egyptian nation, although for practical reasons his office and duties were delegated to high-ranking priests.

In ancient Egypt there was a deeply held belief that chaotic forces had existed before the world was created. In the act of creation, these powerful forces had been banished to the outer edges of the world, but they still continued to encroach upon the society of gods and men. The priests assisted the gods in sustaining the fabric of universal order through the performance of religious rites. (The gods protect the people from ever encroaching, chaotic forces.)
Mans (?) annexed Egypt as a province in 30 bc. Then the next 200 years was replaced with a new belief, Christianity.

Horus: the falcon headed sun god of Memphis in Egypt. After death Egyptian rulers were said to become Horus’s father, the underworld god Osiris.

Horus’ mother was Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris. He was conceived by magical means. According to one myth, after Seth killed his brother Osiris, Isis went to look for Osiris’ body and found it in the delta marshes. She sat on him.

Horus was raised in the marshes in secrecy. When he became a man he determined to avenge his father’s death by Seth. by the gods to have won an…

Isis; daughter of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut. Sister and wife to Osiris, mother to Horus, sister to donkey-headed Seth. taught her subjects how to grind flour, spin, weave and cure illnesses. She also introduced the custom of marriage. She … (?) some of his power and her unmatched skill in the magic arts.
The Greeks identified her with Demeter, Hera and Aphrodite.

Osiris was depicted as a bearded man, wearing the crown of upper Egypt and swaddled like a mummy. He holds a crook and flail, symbol of his power insignia also comprised sheaves of corn, placed one above the other.

Because the ancient Egyptians were so concerned about the afterlife, Osiris was the object of intense reverence. He was addressed as the king of… (?) His first task as a ruler was to civilize his subjects; he abolished cannibalism, taught them how to make agricultural tools and cultivate grapes and wheat, and showed them how to make wine and bread. He also instructed them in the arts of weaving and making music; and he instituted religious worship and a legal system.

Having civilized Egypt, Osiris decided. (?)
Seth threw a party and presented a beautiful coffin. He said whoever can fit into the coffin can have it. Osiris was presented the option first. Seth slammed it shut and closed it shut with lead. He then took it to the river and threw it in. The coffin floated out to sea and came to rest at the base of a tamarisk tree at Byblos in Phoenicia. Then She (Isis) took the coffin to the swamp of the nile delta. Er and Nut gathered up the pieces and resurrected Osiris.

According to one version of the myth, Osiris could have stayed and ruled Egypt. Instead he chose to become lord of the dead in the infertile, subterranean land that the Egyptians believed existed beyond the western horizon.

The dead were believed to visit Osiris in order to seek permission to enter his underground kingdom and to ensure the continued sustenance of their souls. The heart of each supplicant was weighed on the scales of judgment against the feather of truth, in front of Osiris and his forty two assessors. Anubis weighed the heart and the divine scribe Thoth recorded the result.

When I was 17 i broke up a fight between two kids I knew. Another kid I knew pushed me hard back, mad that I’d broke up the fight. I could see my friends were just being used so i said enough. I guess I was supposed to turn around and attack my friend who pushed me in hopes of a mass riot which would be a lot of fun for the tough kids, but not for the rest of us. So I didn’t. I didn’t give them the pleasure. But the fight was broken up and all my other friend was was disappointed and not really mad. He wanted to see a good fight. Me too! I love to see a good fight even though I act like I don’t. Love it. But I never instigated them because I could see what kind of ugly things they really were. That’s what people have to realize about any sort of battle, its ugliness. On that thought I present to you an excerpt out of a school textbook from the 60s. It simply consists of important literary documents and speeches over our history. I present one of those here to you today.

Fargo Kantrowitz

John F. Kennedy

Our Disarmament Doctrine

“Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.”

Partial text of President Kennedy’s address to the United Nations General Assembly Sept. 26 1961.

We meet in an hour of grief and challenge, Dag Hammarskjold is dead. But the United Nations lives on. His tragedy is deep in our hearts, but the task for which he died is at the top of our agenda.

A noble servant of peace is gone. But the quest for peace lies before us.

The problem is not death of one man-the problem is the life of this organization. It will either grow to meet the challenge of our age-or it will be gone with the wind, without influence, without force, without respect.

Were we to let it die-to enfeeble its vigor-to cripple its powers-we would condemn the future.

For in the development of this organization rests the only true alternative to war-and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative.

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and fear, would well engulf the great and small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war-or war will put an end to mankind.

So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live-or die-in vain. Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace.

And, as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war.

This will require new strength and new roles for a new United Nations. For disarmament without checks is but a shadow-and a community without law is but a shell.

Already the United Nations has become both the measure and the vehicle of man’s most generous impulses. Already it has provided-in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia-a means of holding violence within bounds.

But the great question which confronted this body in 1945 is still before us-whether man’s cherished hopes for progress and freedom are to be destroyed by tactics of terror and disruption-whether the “foul winds of war” can be tamed in time to free the cooling winds of reason-and whether the pledges of our charter are to be fulfilled or defied: pledges to secure peace, progress, human rights and respect for world law.

In this hall there are not three forces, but only two. One is composed of those wsho are trying to build the kind of world described in Articles I and II of the charter. The other, seeking a different world, would undermine this organization in the process.

Today of all days our dedication to that charter must be strengthened.

It must be strengthened first of all, by the selection of an outstanding civil servant to carry forward the responsibilities of the secretary general-a man endowed with both the wisdom and the power to make meaningful the moral force of the world community.

The late secreatary general nurtured and sharpened the United Nations’ obligations to act. But the did not invent it. It was there in the charter. It is still here in the charter.

The secretary general, in a very real sense, is the servant of this Assembly. Diminish his authority and you diminish the authority of the only body where all nations, regardless of power, are equal and sovereign.

The United Nations protects the weak

Until all the powerful are just, the weak will be secure only in the strength of this Assembly.

Effective and independent executive action is not the same question as balanced representation.

In view of the enormous change in the membership of this body since its founding, the American delegation will join in any effort for the prompt review and revision of the composition of United Nations bodies.

But to give this organization three drivers-to permit each great power in effect to decide its own case-would entrench the Cold War in the headquarters of peace.

Whatever advantages such a plan holds out to my country, as one of the great powers, we reject it. For we prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war, in the age of mass extermination.

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when it may no longer be habitable.

Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of b eing cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

Men no longer debate whether armaments are a symptom or cause of tension.

The mere existence of modern weapons-10,000,000 times more destructive than anything the world has ever known, and only minutes away from any target on earth-is a source of horro, of discord and distrust.

Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes-for disarmament must be a part of any permanent settlement.

And men no longer pretend tht the quest for disarmament is a sign of weakness-for in a spiraling arms race, a nation’s security may well be shrinking even as its arms increase.

A matter of life – or death

For 15 years this organization has sought the reduction and destruction of arms. Now that goal is no longer a dream-it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an 8unlimited arms race.

It is in this spirit that the recent Belgrade conference-recognizing that this is no longer a Soviet problem or an American problem, but a human problem-endorsed a program of “general, complete and strictly and internationally controlled disarmament.”

It is in this same spirit that we in the United States have labored this year, with a new urgency, and with a new, now-statutory agency fully endorsed by the Congress, to find an approach to disarmament which would be so far-reaching yet realistic, so mutually balanced and beneficial, that it could be accepted by every nation.

And it is in this spirit that we have presented to the Soviet Union-under the label both nations now accept of “general and complete disarmament.” -a statement of newly agreed principles for negotiation.

But we are well aware that all issues of principle are not settled-and that principles alone are not enough.

Our intention is complete disarmament

It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to arms race, but to a peace race-to advance with us step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has actually been achieved.

We invite them now to go beyond agreement in principle to reach agreement on actual plans.

The program to be presented to this Assembly-for general and complete disarmament under effective international control-moves to bridge the gap between those who insist on a gradual approach and those who talk only of the final and total achievement.

It would create machinery to keep the peace as it destroys the machines of war. It would proceed through balanced and safeguarded stages designed to give no state a military advantage over another.

It would place the final responsibility for verification and control where it belongs-not with the big powers alone, not with one’s adversary or one’s self-but in an international organization within the framework of the United Nations itself.

It would assure that indispensable condition of disarmament organization, a steady reduction in forces, both nuclear and conventional, until it has abolished all armies and all weapons except those needed for internal order and a new United Nations peace force.

And it starts that process now, today, even as the talks begins.

Our disarmament proposals

But to halt the spread of these terrible weapons, to halt the contamination of the air, to halt the spiraling nuclear arms race, we remain ready to seek new avenues of agreement. Our new disarmament program thus includes the following proposals:

-First, signing the test-ban treaty, by all nations, This can be done now. Test ban negotiations need not and should not await general disarmament talks.

-Second, stopping the production of fissionable materials for use in weapons and preventing their transfer to any nation now lacking nuclear weapons.

-Third, prohibiting the transfer of control over nuclear weapons to states that do not now own them.

-Finally, halting the unlimited testing and production of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and gradually destroying them as well.

To destroy arms, however, is not enough, we must create even as we destroy-creating worldwide law and law enforcement as we outlaw worldwide war and weapons.

In the world we seek, United Nations emergency forces which have been hastily assembled, uncertainly supplied and inadequately financed will never be enough.

Therefore, the United States recommends that all member nations earmark special peace-keeping units in their armed forces-to be on call to the United Nations-to be specially trained and quickly available-and with advance provision for financial and logistic support.

In addition, the American delegation will suggest a series of steps to improve the United Nations machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes-for on-the-spot fact-finding, mediation and adjudication-for extending the rule of international law.

For peace is not solely a military or technical problem-it is primarily a problem of politics and people.

And unless man can match his strides in weaponry and technology with equal strides in social and political development, our great strength, like that of the dinosaur, will become incapable of proper control-and man, like the dinosaur, will decline and disappear.

Man’s new domain: outer space

As we extend the rule of law on earth, so must we also extend it to man’s new domain: outer space.

All of us salute the brave cosmonauts of the Soviet Union. The new horizons of outer space must not be riven by the old bitter concepts of imperialism and sovereign claims. The cold reaches of the universe must not become the new arena of an even colder war.

To this end, we shall urge proposals extending the United Nations charter to the limits of man’s exploration in the universe, reserving outer space for peaceful use, prohibiting weapons of mass destruction in space or on celestial bodies and opening the mysteries and benefits of space to every nation.

We shall propose cooperative efforts in weather prediction and eventually weather control.

We shall propose, finally, a global system of communications satellites linking the whole world in telegraph, telephone, radio and television.

The day need not be far away when such a system will televise the proceedings of this body to every corner of the world.

But the mysteries of outer space must not divert our eyes or our energies from the harsh realities that face our own fellow men.

Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means to meet poverty, illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.

That is why my nation-which has freely shared its capital and its technology to help others help themselves-now proposes officially designating this decade of the 1960s as the UN Decade of Development.

A short story by Albert Jones to be read on Thursday night at the Riverpark Theatre on the river.
7 p.m.Picnic lunch, bring the kids. Then watch the moon come up while listening to the rocking and fun sounds of Texa till midnight.

As always, absolutely free.

Everything ever almost sent

Everything ever almost sent
by Albert Jones
-stories-

Albert

First of all, I’m tired of thinking about the art of writing as important. It is not important. It is pain. It is not to be striven after.
I am not a good writer and no longer wish to be one. I do however desire to be a truthful writer. Therefore, from this moment, the aspiring writer in me dies. I am re-born as a man with a different mission, other than the one who puts down for others the best combination of words.
The trouble with writing is that I never have anybody to write towards or to. This makes the act too solitary and slightly ridiculous if you think about it since at an acorn level I already know the entire unwritten story. It is in my latent emotions. Perhaps my very genes.
Bringing it to fruition is for you, gentle reader, and I’ve lived long enough to know that most don’t read anymore. I don’t know you and if I did I don’t think our communication gulf would be bridged by any attempt at words. I won’t slave for you and if I want money I’ll get a job. So why does my desire to write continue?
I sit without an audience wearing a label I placed upon myself years ago: writer. I am, by all accounts, a failed one at that. And yet I find there is some reason to write each next word. As if the words will take me to where I want to go. As if I know where there is to go. I think I know now that each next word is there only for itself. Each one is a particular designation, a pointing finger, a chalice holding truth. Each encapsulates in some way the untouchable essence of often distant emotions. Words en masse form landscapes of soul, thousands upon thousands of symbols forming mood and sometimes knowledge. The landscape is of the inner world. I am a child crying to be allowed to cry.
In the solitary place of writing, the inner moonscape where neighbors don’t exist, friendless is taken for given, cognizance of death is as common as that of life. All moments are as if listening to themselves. I sit waiting for realization, no longer expecting the almighty dollar for my efforts, believing that if there is a God he pays the writer in full at the time of creation.

And there is nothing to hold and say “Here It Is!” All attempts at grasping fade. Each emotive high an illusion. The words down, but the eyes again ever wandering for more of something not yet named. The bane of the writer: always wanting more. No outside world sways me. No inside world is believed in by a “single other human being.” We saddle our minds to ride, but are bucked. Our unities fall away dismembered and we see no reason to piece them back together again since we’d already seen them and taken note. That is what we do best: take note. But then the pain becomes real again because we didn’t “know” what we’d “seen.” The emptiness, the “void” becomes real again. We begin to write around everything that we thought we’d attempted to write about before. We write around everything which we believe is not yet born. With words whose meanings we barely know and we hope or we pray. Some believe writing is prayer. Maybe.
Some believe writing is a hope for dreams to become reality. This is obviously true. But we shouldn’t hope too hard for then we break into the worlds where we do not belong. Imagine a ship leaving a harbor with nobody aboard but never stopping. We can ride that ship in our imagination, lose ourselves to the swaying of the seas until when land appears again we do not know how to use our feet to walk upon it. We write, instead, in order to leave that ship, in order to grow up. We need out of the prisons of our hopes. We don’t want words. We want keys to open doors. We only use words. We seek to understand each word, but we want even more to know the world which the word suggests to us. We want golden palaces in the ether. We want blue air beneath us. We want dolphins and adventure and the forgetting of needing to use words as surrogates for our lives.

*** Buy the book here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/display-product.ep?pGUID=2172740&mustExist=true *** One of these bleak yet potent cracks in his usually peaceful, waking world one day appeared in his sleep. It happened in a dream, a nightmare really, and Bernard could not handle it. He had dreamed of a bird flying in a wide blue sky, a mountain far […]

there are a million ways by joey kantor space. the final frontier. space. the final frontier. oh no, not another one of those books where the Mac hunter welcomes you and belittles your sense of now. Well, then why don’t you get the popcorn. because i don’t have any […]